Re: Hydra Design Goals: How important is RDF?

2015-10-01 11:11 GMT+02:00 Melvin Carvalho <melvincarvalho@gmail.com>:

>> As with JSON-LD, I feel the RDF part of Hydra is both
>> under-communicated and more of a nice-to-have than the core value of
>> the technologies. I think this is a good thing. While RDF and the
>> Semantic Web is awesome in its prospects, I highly doubt most people
>> getting their hands dirty with JSON-LD or Hydra will have a Semantic
>> Web perspective or problems related to RDF to solve.
>
> Why do you think this?

Because RDF is an abstract and complex concept and technology with
annotation and syntax that requires (a lot of) training to understand
and decipher. That training will seem worthless when what you want to
do is consume some JSON from a random HTTP API.

>> Related and relevant: "JSON-LD and Why I Hate the Semantic Web"
>> http://manu.sporny.org/2014/json-ld-origins-2/
>
> Yet another RDF hit piece.  Do you agree with it?  Any of the points in
> particular?

I don't read it as a hit piece. I read it as a very important design
goal when creating JSON-LD. If you put RDF front and center of any
technology and ignore every other "unimportant" detail like
serialization format, syntax and how it is possible to use and even
make any sense of without intimate knowledge of RDF, you essentially
make the technology useless for ordinary developers.

> By the way the author of that post is using RDF now.

Yes, I know. But that is both besides the point and incidental.

> Prediction is a dangerous game.  The web has shown time and again that our
> assumptions for the future dont always match reality.  What's better is to
> say both Hydra and JSON LD are useful tools.  There's other useful tools
> such as turtle and rml ( http://rml.io/ ).  As the space becomes (hopefully)
> more mature, we can observe what tooling becomes popular.  We're still in
> the first 1% of the journey.

I absolutely agree. Which is why I think we should make Hydra as
accessible to non-RDF-conniseurs as possible and not wave any
arguments related to simple matters like the serialization format as
"unimportant since they can be changed with JSON-LD and are
meaningless in RDF anyway".

> RDF is a nice to have, because it has several interesting architectural
> properties (explained in design issues and other places).

I completely agree! I find RDF extremely fascinating and powerful and
really hope everything built on top of it in the years to come to
change the shape of the web as we know it. I just think that RDF/XML
failed exactly because of "unimportant matters like serialization
format" and don't want the same to happen with Hydra. I think JSON-LD
has made the right choices in terms of readability and accessibility
for people unfamiliar with RDF, much due to the original design goal
which was described in Manu's blog post.

> RDF could be swapped out for a similar technology, but as far as I know
> none exists, so let's just embrace it for now, until one exists.

I'm not saying we should swap out RDF. I'm just saying; let's not let
the RDF aspects of Hydra overshadow all design decisions, causing the
end result to be unintelligible for people who don't know or
understand RDF.

>> So: How important is RDF and the Semantic Web as a design goal for
>> Hydra? Should it be made more explicit?
>
> I think it's a critical component, at this point in time.  But would be open
> to suggestion.

Good. I agree it's a critical component and that much of what JSON-LD
and Hydra does would be very hard without RDF. But should "RDF Front
And Center" be a design goal for Hydra, or should we have a more
pragmatic, layman-friendly approach and say "RDF is important, but
should not overshadow all other concerns even though from an RDF point
of view, they are irrelevant"?

-- 
Asbjørn Ulsberg           -=|=-        asbjorn@ulsberg.no
«He's a loathsome offensive brute, yet I can't look away»

Received on Friday, 2 October 2015 11:34:58 UTC